Lives Matter movement , the 1619 Project , and critical race theory . And dismantled they should be to establish symbolic markers in the struggle against revisionist white supremacist nostalgias . mainstream print media and a limited number of radio and television channels . Prohibiting Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi propaganda has thus worked reasonably well in Germany over time in helping to create that Erinnerungskultur I spoke of earlier ,
9 . You have on occasion warned of the risks involved in transforming places of repression and torture into places of memory , which have then become enclaves for tourism – you have even spoken of “ topolatry ”. What are these risks ? How should we treat these places so as not to fall into such risks ?
AH : I do not underestimate the power of sites of torture , murder , and genocide to generate remembrance . The ESMA in Buenos Aires , Villa Grimaldi in Santiago de Chile or Buchenwald in Germany offer irrefutable evidence of state crimes . Memory culture in Argentina , Chile or Germany is no doubt stronger because these memory sites , created by pressures from civil society , prevent erasure and forgetting . Perhaps it was unavoidable that Auschwitz , given its centrality as a cipher for the Holocaust , became a center of genocide tourism . I would not want to disparage anybody who says they learned from their visit to the death camp , but we should be mindful that banalization and kitschification of historical catastrophes is an always present danger . but it has not prevented the recent rise of the AdF with its openly fascist vocabulary , dog whistle anti- Semitism , and unhinged conspiracy phantasies . The spread of hate speech and lies on social media platforms and right-wing news sites has required multiple legislative changes in Germany . Public memory policies seem even more necessary now than in the past . At the same time , we know that prohibitions always risk making the prohibited more attractive and more popular . And that popularity may grow exponentially via the internet and social media and create unwanted political backlash . The Janus face of public memory policy in Europe is even more evident if one considers how the nationalist government of Poland has enacted a law penalizing any mention of Polish complicity in Nazi crimes , thus distorting historical reality in the name of national honor and dignity . Here , public memory policy has been hijacked to support a radical historical revisionism rather than historical truth .
So let us not rely too much on memory legislation to determine public memory discourse . In the best of cases , it may yield its desired effects , but only if the agents of civil society , including public education , investigative journalism , and the arts , step up against attempts by right-wing historical
10 . What do you think are the main challenges that a public policy on memory should deal with ? revisionists to undermine democracy with denials of accountability , falsifications of history and nationalist nostalgias . Such are the memory battles of our time .
AH : I am deeply sceptical about legislating historical truth and I doubt whether public policy , articulated by a government commission , written into law , and designed to strengthen the memory of historical trauma , will ever be able to overcome the political battle lines in the present between those who want to remember past injustices and violations of rights and those who want to forget . Government supported memory politics may have worked in the past when public discourse was largely shaped by
INTERVIEW
41